


And Time on My Mind

by norgbelulah



Category: Justified
Genre: Brainwashing, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-17
Updated: 2011-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-26 00:15:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,556
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/276443
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/norgbelulah/pseuds/norgbelulah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The past is the past, the future is now, and all of it is nothing but time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And Time on My Mind

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "wild card" square on my hc_bingo card. I chose the "brainwashing" prompt.

It was a year ago to the day since Boyd Crowder had shipped home from the deserts of Kuwait.

It was three months and twelve days since he left his daddy’s house in the night, tired of the bullshit, done with the expectations. Two months and five days since he’d come into this backwater town and a man with a Confederate flag and a swastika slapped onto the back of his truck picked him up off the side of the road.

It was fifty-seven nights he’d been sleeping in the the barracks of the Army of the Coming White Revolution, and a round fifty since he’d secured himself the best bunk. Nineteen days since he’d been invited into the inner sanctum of Hannibal G. Rafferty, Grand General, to meet with his circle of advisers and cronies. They’d called him kid and the big man didn’t remind him too much of Bo. They gave him a glass of scotch and let him in on some plans coming down the pipeline, some contacts in other states, back home in Harlan, too.

It was sixteen hours since Boyd told them to tattoo their symbol on his chest, drunk as a skunk and crowing ‘til morning. It hurt like a bitch, but he sang their songs and said those words and something happened to him.

It was that day on that very day a year from his release from the clutches of the foul and corrupt federal government of Jews, Commies, and Lefty-sympathizers, that someone finally put a gun in his hands once more.

They said soon they’d get him something bigger. Real firepower. He smiled and said, “Fire in the hole, boys.”

 

 _He wouldn’t emerge for fourteen years. He would realize the lies, the empty promises, the unmitigated violence. He would comprehend it, but he would let it slip past him because it was easier._

 _It would take a bullet that missed his heart to pull his mind out of that trap. It would take a year-long walk through the light and the darkness, through the hills and the trees, towards a woman and a home, to put his heart and his mind right again._

 _He would always love her for it and for so much more, for all the years of his life._

 

Ava met Bowman Crowder on a Monday morning, the first day of fifth grade. Bowman’s mama didn’t believe in public school, but Bowman said she was dead now and his daddy was making them go to school. Bowman sat at the desk next to hers and she showed him how he could put his books and papers inside it so he wouldn’t lose them. She told him where the boys bathroom was and how to get the best food on the lunch line and she smiled when he said “thanks” real polite.

By the next Wednesday, Bowman was across the room in the thick of it with Billy Pepper and Hank Bob McGurty and he didn’t speak to Ava again until she grew a pair of tits. She didn’t say anything back until Raylan Givens left town under cover of darkness and a cloud of gossip.

It was another Monday morning, in Civics class that she told him he could take her to the Homecoming dance and he said she’d better look damn good. Ava never dreamed she’d be crowned Queen two years running.

They were married on a Sunday afternoon, amid hoots and hollers of his friends and the significant absence of much of her family. She let it slide past, telling herself soon they’d build their own family.

It was a Tuesday night only a few years later that she first felt abused by him. Afterwards, she would think about times before and realize that’s what had been going on. But it was that night, when he’d come home and the pork was still raw because the element in the oven had blown, when he’d called her an idiot woman, said a child could do what she did, and slapped her hard across the face, that she had felt she’d somehow fallen into the worst cliche she could think of. Later, he came up with so many more original ways to torment her and she wondered what she’d done, that he could have come to hate her, that he could turn around and say a million times he was sorry but do it again and again. She told herself it was only him and not anything she could do. She read about it in a solitary corner of the library, in magazines she’d taken from the salon. They told her it was a power thing, control and manipulation, that she had to break some kind of cycle.

The first time she left him was a Thursday morning after he went to work. It was a Friday night the last time she tried. He caught up with her in Lexington. He looked in all the hotels he passed until he found her. It took him three days.

It was a Monday morning and she hadn’t gone to work, but he found her anyway in that motel off the state road. He begged her to come back. He said if she didn’t he’d put a bullet in his brain, did she want to be a murderer?

No, she didn’t want that. Ava didn’t want him dead, she only wanted him to stop. It was that Monday that she wondered if even wanting that was too much. Maybe she could just do what he wanted, maybe that could work. She thought those things and she hated herself and she went back with him to Harlan.

He said maybe she could make country fried steak that night. And she smiled, said nothing, and made it for him. She laid it on the table and cried silently in the kitchen, cigarette burning in her hand.

 _It would be a Monday too, the day Ava would shoot Bowman. She’d think about it all day as she was working, driving, cooking that meal for him, his last meal._

 _It would be a Wednesday that Raylan Givens would catch her cleaning his blood off the floor and on a Thursday he would shoot another man in that very same spot. That very same man that they would let out of prison, that would drag her out of his daddy’s cabin when even more bullets were flying, that would change her life as he made himself a place in it._

 _She wouldn’t remember what day it was she realized how her feelings for him had changed. She wouldn’t be able to put a finger on what it was or when. But she would know when he tried to leave what it would do to her._

 _She would never feel so happy, could never dream of feeling more loved than the night he came back._

 

Ava fingered the black-tinged skin of his tattoo, the big one on his chest and said, “Boyd,” with a question in her voice. Her head was pillowed on his shoulder, her eyes at level with his collarbone.

There was something about that big black symbol. It didn’t distress her or disgust her. It was just, somehow, a part of him.

Boyd made a humming sound, a question too, he was drowsy and her touch felt good.

“Did it hurt when they gave you this?” Her tone was careful, because she wasn’t sure if he’d want to talk about it.

He knew that was natural. There was so much they hadn’t talked about. “It did,” he answered and opened his eyes to look at her. “But it was a long time ago.” Her expression was quietly curious and she nodded at his answer, even as he continued. “Ava, they didn’t just give it to me, either. I asked them for it.”

“I know,” she said simply and did not move her hand. She kept her fingers moving along the thick black lines, tracing them as if she could memorize by touch alone.

He shivered beneath her ministrations as she asked, “Did you ever believe any of it?”

“Yes,” he answered honestly. “When I was young and hadn’t thought much about it. I spent a lot longer telling myself it didn’t matter that I knew it was shit. It was a way of life that I knew I could live and prosper upon. I made a lot of money off that nonsense, more money than satisfaction. But it all amounted to nothing in the end. I suppose that’s just how these things go.” Boyd raised his own hand to trace long circles across this white skin of Ava’s arm and shoulder.

She smiled sadly and said, “I suppose so.”

He pressed his lips to her temple and she sighed.

“You wouldn’t get rid of it,” she spoke without the intonation of a query, like she was absolutely certain.

“No,” he agreed. “It’s a reminder, certainly, but more than that. It’s part of me, of who I was and am. I’d sooner chop off a finger.”

“Like a scar,” she said and looked into his eyes. “Right?”

“Yes, baby,” he said pulling her close. His hand drew across a faded discoloration on her upper arm. Boyd knew it had been a burn once, a bad one. “Very much like a scar.”


End file.
